We Interrupt this Program

I’m a huge Bob Cringely fan. In fact, I own both his classic PBS documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” and the sequel “Nerds 2.0.1” on VHS. Outnerd that, suckahs!

Anyway, Bob’s weekly column is generally entertaining because he’s not afraid to go out on a limb and say something potentially ridiculous. His recent column on Google’s ambitions in the TV advertising space is a case in point:

Google imagines a world where only single people see match.com ads, and people who can’t drive see ads from taxi companies where others see Toyota campaigns. Where fraternities see ads for strip clubs, beer, Cancun weekends and LSAT prep courses, and only seniors (and their adult children) see ads for Alzheimer’s drugs. What would be the value of that increased efficiency, capitalized into present dollars? Ten billion? Fifty billion? I say the value is $100 billion — 25 percent of the total U.S. advertising market and 15 times Google’s current size.

Cringley believes this will come to pass because Google’s edge in advertising is “granularity”. So it stands to reason that the googlization of TV will result in more targeted ads. Or does it? What analyses like this tend to forget is that TV ads are a throwback to an ancient time when broadcast was the only game in town for delivering video, and mass advertising the only plausible way of financing it. The whole point of TV spots is that they’re fairly generic, so they gel nicely with the broadcast model.

What’s actually going to happen is that broadcast is going to suffer a slow and agonizing demise over the next few years. It will be replaced by video on demand, enabling viewers to choose exactly what they want to see and watch it whenever convenient. It’s increasingly clear that people don’t like their shows interrupted incessantly. If ads become so targeted that they start recommending Italian restaurants for us to dine at this evening, as in Cringely’s example, then what possible value is there in delivering them on TV, where they are at their most vacuous and annoying? The real trend will be for internet-style search services to migrate onto the boob tube. After all, the core value of TV ads is in their ability to sell undifferentiated staples like breakfast cereal and laundry detergent to the masses using the same generic shiny happy models, running on a sun-drenched beach. Once I can get real information with a click of my remote, they will be utterly irrelevant.

Update: Apparently even the advertising industry agrees that “Advertising is Obsolete”. I felt very avant-garde when I first started ranting about this, but it’s finally beginning to seep into the mainstream.

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2 Comments »

1. hey this is a nice site i guess….

   Comment by courtney — 1/25/2006 @ 1:40 am

2. Advertising isn’t going away, just its current paradigm. That’s why Cringley picked Google to speculate about. I usually find him completely batty, but I think he sort of hit the nail on the head here, and his thoughts are not contradictory to yours. I don’t think Cringley is saying a TV will still be playing broadcast.

   Comment by mwarden — 2/4/2006 @ 8:56 pm

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